I had a sense of déjà vu as I read Mr. Luce’s column. Except that he seemed to echo David Brooks, who dons, at his political convenience, the mantle of popular sociologist,  political prophet and/or national moral scold. Sometimes all three of these persona make an appearance in his rhetorical meanders. In Mr. Luce’s essay the players are familiar Clinton and Trump, with the addition of Cruz or other actors doing walk-ons, yet the political context seems not just amiss, but surreal to the point of sowing the seeds of a confusion that is  politically exploitable.This, an old gambit used by Neo-Conservatives, but renders Mr. Luce’s essay into the realm of mystery, comprehended only by himself, or just call it an exercise in recursive imagining. If my explanation seems a bit off kilter, I take my cue from our author’s extemporizing on a theme.

As readers, we see the Republican Party committing a mass suicide, although some of the Republican Nihilists, and the bellicose Neo-Conservatives,have declared for Mrs. Clinton. The Trump candidacy is a result of the nihilism that the Republicans have exercised since Obama’s inauguration in 2009 to the present. And Mrs. Clinton and her New Democratic allies demonstrated, with documentary evidence, the character of the Party as utterly in the hands of a machine candidate and her minions: Deborah Wasserman-Schultz’s  firing from the DNC and seamless hiring by the Clinton coterie makes clear the what and why of The New Democrats: who operate in this political/moral context as the savior of American political rationalism.  

Political Reporter

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